man, this is a real treasure hunt! it's a long long article & every fews lines it refers to some other article or news web page. I found it while searching for the reason why my music software works with a huge latency in Vista. It's fun to read when you are bored.

QUOTE

In order to prevent active attacks, device drivers are required to poll the underlying hardware every 30ms for digital outputs and every 150 ms for analog ones to ensure that everything appears kosher.

I'm gonna track this down! i really don't like to keep an XP installation.